ICO: the first blockchain solution for 3D printing industry

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The 3DES project developing a decentralized solution for 3D slicing problem announced a crowdfunding campaign. The pre-ICO is live now .

According to the project’s authors, the 3D printing market is mostly underestimated and is still on it’s early active developing stage. However, the technology is already widely used in many spheres of production such as automobile industry, aerospace and military industry, healthcare industry, building industry and a large market of consumer products manufacturing. The project’s authors presume that the 3D printing technology seriously enables to decentralize and cheapen the products manufacturing due to the following factors:

1. Flexibility of 3D printers (lowers the necessity to purchase a wide range of production equipment).
2. Small amount of production waste (3D printer uses only a required amount of resources for a product manufacturing).
3. Logistic optimizasion (resources can be delivered to the final consumer - an owner of a 3D printer).
4. Small sized production (no need for large scale industrial premises).
5. Decrease of the added value share of the final product’s price.
6. Simplicity of unique items production (manual labour isn’t needed).

Thanks to the mentioned factors, the 3D printing technology lowers the production market enter barriers for small business. Some part of production products supply may be provided by its consumers who own 3D printers.

In order to check the information relevance provided by the project authors I approached the analytic researches of consulting agencies:

According to the Siemens corporation projections, the 3D printing will get 50% cheaper and the printing speed will get 400% faster in 5 years.

According to estimates from EY, a British consulting company, the 3D printing market may grow 4 times by the year 2020 and reach $20B.

According to McKinsey, an international consulting company, the 3D printing market would reach $550B by the year 2025 [4]. This way, the 3D printing market will potentially grow 100 times in 8 years.

Estimating the benefits of developing and implementing the 3D printing technology, the 3DES developers defined the existing technological problems that impede the rapid growth of target auditory - the technology users, and thus prevent the new players from entering the market. Solution for one of the problems, specifically the one of the slicing process became the base of a 3DES project product. 

The slicing term means the process of converting a 3D model into a control code (a list of commands) for a certain 3D printer.

Here is an extract from the startup’s official WhitePaper:

«Many problems appear on the slicing stage, forcing a user to adjust the settings multiple times before printing in order to achieve an object of suitable quality. In the meantime, it is the most resource-intensive stage. First of all, it concerns people, who can’t afford expensive computing equipment. 

For a low-power computer this is a longtime process requiring all the computing capacity, at which point the computer can’t be used for other purposes during the slicing. Consequently, the work efficiency decreases, since the slicing process needs to be repeated with every slightest settings adjustment.

Basing on this problem, our team made a conclusion, that the industry needs a product enabling the fastest and the cheapest possible 3D model slicing process using any computing equipment.»

The authors assume that the slicing speed problem can be solved using a decentralized slicer that allows users with low-power equipment to rent computing capacity from other users (a p2p interaction model), paying the service with DES tokens. In the end a user who paid the slicing service gets a generated G-Code - the mentioned list of commands for a 3D printer.

Let’s have a look at for a technical realization description:

The following points describe the scheme in detail:

1. Platform realization for decentralized slicing is made using Ethereum smart-contracts with DES tokens issued on TokenSale.
2. There are 2 parties on the scheme:

2.1. Customer - a user ordering a 3D model processing service, who sends a 3D model to the worker. On the customer’s side the slicing difficulty is calculated using a greed module, then the price is calculated accordingly. A worker is either chosen manually by the customer, or automatically based on the set price and speed balance parameters.

2.2. Worker - a user processing a model returns the client a G-Code. A worker is able either to set a fixed price on a service, or to use a program module to calculate the service price according to the computing power evaluation. The workers rating shown to the customers is formed based on these parameters.

3. Greed program module:

3.1. On a customer’s side it receives a 3D model and slicer settings to calculate the difficulty and a corresponding slicing price, returns the price value to the customer (score).

3.2. On the worker’s side calculates the difficulty of a received task and returns the service providing difficulty data to the worker.

4. Dispute situations and it’s resolution. Disputes happen in case of the second scenario (fig. 4).

4.1 The worker is satisfied with evaluation results comparison, he/she completes the order, sends the G-Code to the customer and also places it in the buffer where it will be stored for 20 minutes, so that the customer could dispute the deal. When the customer confirms that the work is complete, the cryptocurrency is transferred to the worker.

4.2 The worker completes the order like in the previous case, but the customer disagrees with the 3D model processing (Fig. 5), the client’s software addresses the Trusted Node (3) and makes a security deposit in the amount of the contract value. This ensures the Trusted Node wouldn’t be attacked and stays available. Later the Trusted Node takes the data from the Arbitrage Buffer(4), re-evaluates the work difficulty and delivers a verdict (5). The fee is taken either from the customer’s deposit (in case he/she is wrong), or from the worker’s deposit required for providing the slicing services (in case of his/her unfair acts).

The 3DES developers also demonstrated the interface of the software they are working on. Seems it's compatible only with Mac computers.

This software permits users to choose different slicer versions, adjust settings and upload models for slicing.

Developers also presented the project roadmap:

The token sale

1. Pre-ICO (the price is 2.5 times lower than the ICO price) - tokens are sold to the early external investors. The accumulated funds are spent on programmers’ salaries and on marketing promotion. 10% of tokens are sold on the pre-ICO stage.

Status: the start is scheduled on 25 September.

2. ICO - November 2017. The main amount of tokens sale.

The project team keeps the right to possess 15% of total tokens amount.

Conclusion:

The positive facts:

1. There are almost no competitors. Among the variety of ICO startups, this project is the first one turning attention to the 3D printing problems. Also, it is the only project proposing a concept of a decentralized 3D models slicing.
2. Both Blockchain and 3D printing technologies are at the starting stages of their development. The products released when such technologies are joint together result with the accumulated potential.
3. The project authors made an in-depth WhitePaper and designed evident schemes of startup product functioning.
4. In the later roadmap points is scheduled the product expansion: the 3DEX and 3DEC projects. The authors don’t provide the detailed information, which emphasizes the order of events.
5. Back to the roadmap, the tight schedule is worth being mentioned: the investors wouldn’t have to wait a lot.
6. Fixed capitlization at every crowdsale stage.

The negative factors:

1. There isn’t a public version of a product at the moment (in the roadmap it is planned on January 2018).
2. The project doesn’t use escrow due to the necessity to hedge part of the funds and also implement the operating costs on development and marketing.

In conclusion, it’s worth to mention that the project totally deserves attention compared to the others. The developers see the problem and have an elaborated model to solve it. 

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List of reference:

1. THE STATE OF 3D PRINTING.// URL http://www.sculpteo.com/static/0.30.0-62/download/report/Sculpteo_State_of_3D_Printing.pdf 

2. Siemens: 3D Printing: Facts & Forecasts// URL https://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-future/industry-and-automation/Additive-manufacturing-facts-and-forecasts.html

3. EY’s Global 3D printing Report 2016. Page 60. // URL http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-global-3d-printing-report-2016-full-report/$FILE/ey-global-3d-printing-report-2016-full-report.pdf 

4. McKinsey Quarterly. 3-D printing takes shape // URL http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/3-d-printing-takes-shape